In at least a few Milford-area towns, large mounds of dirt-hued snow are melting within isolated dump sites.

Children will never frolic through these sad piles. Painters will never use them as inspiration for vivid snowscapes.

When behemoth storms like the Blizzard of 2013 strike, some towns get too much snow to plow away.

Highway department and public works trucks have to take it somewhere, though, and before the storm hits, a dump site is selected - often places big enough for at least a football field of the white stuff.

Enter the melting molehills.

Upton drops its problem snow in front of the sewer plant on Maple Avenue. Or, sometimes, the Department of Public Works makes use of land surrounding its Pleasant Street headquarters.

Medway Department of Public Services Director Thomas Holder said the town’s intersections were buried after the weekend’s storm. On Monday and Tuesday, all of that snow was moved to an empty Broad Street lot.

"We probably did a couple dozen intersections," Holder said. "We had a total of six trucks and three loaders."

In Milford, a long mound of brown snow sits in a muddy lot at the end of Asylum Street. It’s a depressing scene.

Highway Surveyor Scott Crisafulli said his department spent all of Sunday and Monday night hauling snow. There was certainly enough of it to go around: the town recorded more than 27 inches.

The job required 15 dump trucks and a 300-horsepower yellow monster of a snowblower that some call "The Beast." Crews worked 12 hours on Sunday night and eight hours on Monday night. They transferred two loads an hour, with each truck carrying about 25 cubic yards of snow.

All told, Crisafulli estimated the sleep-deprived crews deposited roughly 1,000 cubic yards of snow in the lot. Asked how much in pounds that amounted to, he said "a lot."

They probably would have dug out a lot more, too, had "The Beast" — its name comes from the shark teeth painted on its front end — not broken down during the early hours of Monday morning.

"It’s a key piece of equipment," Crisafulli said. "It’s not something that you use a lot. We had to have a special part made for it."